The question usually arrives as a percentage — is 40% right, should it be 45 — and the percentage is the least important part of the answer.
What decides whether a hire works is whether their chair fills, and that is mostly your job rather than theirs. Here is how to think about the offer.
Start from what the chair has to earn
Before deciding a rate, work out what the chair costs you.
A rough version: your fixed costs divided by the number of chairs, plus the product cost on the services they will perform, plus the employer share of payroll taxes on whatever you pay them. That is the floor the chair has to clear before anything they do is worth having.
Then look at what they can realistically bill. A new stylist with no book might do $900 a week in month one and $2,200 by month six, if you are feeding them. If you are not feeding them, month six looks like month one.
That gap between month one and month six is the entire risk in this hire, and how you structure the pay decides who carries it.
The four structures, and who carries the risk
Hourly. You carry all of it. Predictable for them, expensive for you in the early months, and it removes any incentive to rebook. Usually a bad fit alone, and reasonable as a floor.
Straight commission. They carry all of it. Cheap for you and brutal for a new stylist with no clients, who will leave. Works for someone arriving with a full book.
Hourly or minimum wage against commission — whichever is higher. They get the floor in quiet weeks and the commission once it exceeds it. This is the structure that works for most new hires, because it lets someone survive month one without you paying commission on revenue that does not exist.
Sliding scale. A lower rate up to a weekly target, higher above it. Good for motivation, and worth being careful with the reset period — if the tiers reset weekly, a good week and a bad week do not average out, and people notice.
The number itself
Service commission in this trade commonly runs from the low thirties to the low fifties, and where you sit in that range should depend on what you provide:
Lower end of the range is defensible if you are marketing hard, the front desk books for them, you supply all product and colour, and you rebook at checkout. You are doing a lot of the work.
Higher end is expected if they are bringing clients, supplying some of their own product, or doing their own marketing and booking.
Retail commission is separate and lower — commonly single figures to the low teens. Pay it, though, and make sure the product is on the shelf. Retail attaches to a conversation that happens anyway, and a stylist who is not paid for it will not have the conversation.
Where the money actually comes from
This is the part owners get wrong, and it is worth more than any rate decision.
Rebooking at the chair beats every incentive scheme. A stylist whose clients rebook before they leave will out-earn one on a five-point better rate, and it costs you nothing to make it structural — the card, the diary, the question asked at the chair rather than at the desk.
Filling the empty column is your job. New stylists do not have marketing budgets. If you hand someone a rate and an empty diary, the rate is irrelevant. Give them your new-client overflow, your cancellation fills, and the slots your senior people cannot take.
Do not let a new stylist sit idle in front of clients. Nothing damages a new hire's confidence faster than a quiet first month, and confidence is most of what makes a new stylist book well.
Things to put in writing on day one
- The rate, and what it applies to — service, retail, and anything else
- The pay period and when it lands
- What happens with tips, in cash and on card. Federal law does not let an employer keep any part of an employee's tips, and state rules on tip pooling and on deducting card fees vary. Get this right rather than copying whoever you last worked for
- Who supplies product, and whether anything is deducted. Deductions from pay are constrained by state law and are a common source of claims
- Whose clients they are, and what happens if the stylist leaves. Non-solicitation terms are enforceable in some states and not others
- Review points — when the rate gets looked at again
That last one prevents most pay conversations from becoming confrontations. A stylist who knows the rate is reviewed at six months does not have to ask.
The trial period trap
A lot of salons hire on a low rate "until they build up", with no stated end.
It reads as fair and it lands as indefinite. The stylist builds a book, keeps waiting, and either asks awkwardly or leaves — usually to a competitor who names a number.
If the rate starts low, put the date and the trigger in writing. "45% once weekly service revenue clears $2,000 for four consecutive weeks" is a sentence that keeps a good hire.
What to actually do
- Work out the chair's cost, so you know your floor
- Offer a wage floor against commission, so month one is survivable
- Set the commission where your level of support justifies it
- Pay retail separately and stock the shelf
- Write down the review trigger
- Then spend your attention on filling the column, which matters more than all of the above
Employment rules vary by state and this is a topic where the details carry real liability. Worth an hour with someone local before you write your first offer.